More child deaths and irregular burials by the Catholic Church

We now know pretty well what happened to single mothers in Ireland, up to the 1990s. They were incarcerated in Church-run state-funded, institutions. In these institutions, called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, the women were obliged to carry out hard manual work,  to atone for their sins (and provide profits to the institution). Their children were punished too for the sins of their parents. Usually they were stolen from their mothers. Some of the children were secretly sent abroad to be brought up by good Catholic families. Some became sex toys, Some were beaten to death, starved to death, or murdered in other ways. Mortality rates were over four times higher than in the rest of the population.

Now we know a little bit more. In one home at least, children's bodies - almost 800 - were denied a proper burial but instead dumped in a sewage tank. As you might have guessed, the Catholic Church has declined to apologise, or to carry out or assist in any investigation.

Below is an article from the Guardian, 4th June 2014.

Tell us the truth about the children dumped in Galway's mass graves

Forget prayers. Only full disclosure by Ireland's Catholic church can begin to atone for the children who died in its care 

• • Emer O'Toole
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 4 June 2014 11.39 BST
  • 
    

Sean Ross Abbey, a home run by nuns in County Tipperary, from where 438 babies were secretly exported to the US for adoption. Photograph: Brian Lockier/www.adoptionrightsalliance.com

The bodies of 796 children, between the ages of two days and nine years old, have been found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. They died between 1925 and 1961 in a mother and baby home under the care of the Bon Secours nuns.

Locals have known about the grave since 1975, when two little boys, playing, broke apart the concrete slab covering it and discovered a tomb filled with small skeletons. A parish priest said prayers at the site, and it was sealed once more, the number of bodies below unknown, their names forgotten.

The Tuam historian Catherine Corless discovered the extent of the mass grave when she requested records of children's deaths in the home. The registrar in Galway gave her almost 800. Shocked, she checked 100 of these against graveyard burials, and found only one little boy who had been returned to a family plot. The vast majority of the children's remains, it seemed, were in the septic tank. Corless and a committee have been working tirelessly to raise money for a memorial that includes a plaque bearing each child's name.

For those of you unfamiliar with how, until the 1990s, Ireland dealt with unmarried mothers and their children, here it is: the women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins. Their children were taken from them.

According to Corless, death rates for children in the Tuam mother and baby home, and in similar institutions, were four to five times that of the general population. A health board report from 1944 on the Tuam home describes emaciated, potbellied children, mentally unwell mothers and appalling overcrowding. But, as Corless points out, this was no different to other homes in Ireland. They all had the same mentality: that these women and children should be punished.

Ireland knows all this. We know about the abuse women and children suffered at the hands of the clergy, abuse funded by a theocratic Irish state. What we didn't know is that they threw dead children into unmarked mass graves. But we're inured to these revelations by now.

Corless expresses surprise that the media were so slow to report her story, that people didn't seem to care. If two children were found in an unmarked grave, she observes, it would be news; what about 800? But what is the difference between the wall of lies, denial and secrecy the church constructed to protect its paedophile priests and a concrete slab over the bodies of 796 children neglected to death by nuns? Good people unearth these evil truths, but the church always survives.

The archbishop of Tuam and the head of the Irish Bon Secours sisters will soon meet to discuss the memorial and service planned at the site. The Bon Secours sisters have donated what the Irish TV station RTÉ describes as "a small sum" to the children's graveyard committee.

Father Fintan Monaghan, secretary of the Tuam archediocese, says: "I suppose we can't really judge the past from our point of view, from our lens. All we can do is mark it appropriately and make sure there is a suitable place here where people can come and remember the babies that died."

Let's not judge the past on our morals, then, but on the morals of the time. Was it OK, in mid-20th century Ireland, to throw the bodies of dead children into sewage tanks? Monaghan is really saying: "don't judge the past at all". But we must judge the past, because that is how we learn from it.

Monaghan is correct that we need to mark history appropriately. That's why I am offering the following suggestions as to what the church should do to in response:

Do not say Catholic prayers over these dead children. Don't insult those who were in life despised and abused by you. Instead, tell us where the rest of the bodies are. There were homes throughout Ireland, outrageous child mortality rates in each. Were the Tuam Bon Secours sisters an anomalous, rebellious sect? Or were church practices much the same the country over? If so, how many died in each of these homes? What are their names? Where are their graves? We don't need more platitudinous damage control, but the truth about our history.

Religious Auto-Exceptionalism

Most rationalist are fascinated by the religious mind. There are many aspects to be fascinated by. The failure to see obvious self-contractions and fatal inconsistencies. The failure to follow simple arguments. The love of supposed “mysteries”, and so on. One aspect that seems to have received no attention to date is the phenomenon of making up oppressive rules and then making up reasons to ignore them. This phenomenon of what we might call religious auto-exceptionalism appears to be restricted to monotheistic religions.

Here are a few examples. Let’s start with a couple of Jewish ones. The first is an Hasidic tradition of Jewish women wearing a sheitel, a wig or half-wig. The underlying idea is that, as in Moslem communities, a woman must not let anyone outside her immediate family see her hair. To ensure that no-one can see her hair, she cuts it off, or at least hides it under a sheitel. The sheitel is considered like a sort of hat and there is no rule about who can see your hat. But of course a good sheitel looks just like a natural head of hair. So women wearing a sheitel can go around looking like women with a normal head of hair – even an attractive head of hair. What is going on is that they have made a rule about female modesty, and then developed a way to flout it. In a wonderful piece of triple-think Some Jewish women will then cover their sheitel for the sake of modesty!

Here’s another Jewish example. In the Jewish scriptures God gives his chosen people one day off in every seven. People do not need to work on the Sabbath. The provision permitting people not to work became an injunction not to work. God told Moses to kill a man for collecting firewood on the Sabbath day. The word “work” is interpreted to cover all sorts of activity. Orthodox Jews will not perform such everyday tasks as lighting a fire, making a telephone call or opening an umbrella. In short, all sorts of normal activity is banned, so a small industry has grown up inventing ways of doing things automatically without performing even basic activities. At one end of the spectrum people will prepare a meal the day before, and set an oven timer to cook it for their Sabbath meal. At the other end of the spectrum are a host of specially made devices designed specifically to get around these pointless restrictions. And it gets better. Jeremiah 17:22 says

neither carry forth a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day, neither do ye any work; but hallow ye the Sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers.

So as well as a prohibition on doing things, there is also a prohibition on carrying things out of your house. This covers anything. People cannot for example carry their car keys out of the house. They cannot even carry a prayer book to the synagogue. And the rule affects everyone, so mothers cannot carry babies, not even in strollers. Old people cannot “carry” walking sticks. Sick people cannot carry medicines. Handicapped people cannot “carry” wheelchairs. As has often been observed, only a religious mind can invent nonsense of a magnitude such as this.

This prohibition on “carrying” is taken very seriously by Orthodox Jews who have developed a vast collection of law on the subject, many rules made by one group contradicting rules made by other groups. (If you take something out of your house then bring it back, have you carried it out?). These rules are not only pointless in any rational universe, but seriously oppressive. So religious minds have found ways to justify ways around the rules. An obvious problem is that the rule prohibits the wearing of clothes, and no religious person wants to enforce that. So clothes are considered exempt. And that opens up possibilities. For example if your car key is built into a belt, and you wear the belt, then you are not technically carrying the key! Incidentally, if you think I’m making this up, you can check the facts with any Orthodox Jew, or any book of Jewish law or any Orthodox Jewish website. In the Orthodox community there is much debate over the wearing of spectacles, hearing aids, bandages and plaster casts, and wristwatches, with separate debates over men’s and women’s jewelry.

Wearing instead of carrying is not the only way of getting around the rules. Another is to extend the definition of your “house”. Rabbis have developed a whole fantasy world where “houses” are not actual houses but neighbourhoods. These fantasy houses are ritual enclosures. Originally they had to be linked courtyards, but that proved impractical. So the rules were relaxed to allow an area surrounded by a substantial wall. When that became impractical the rules were changed again to allow a flimsy fence. A ritual area regarded as a single house for the purposes of Jewish law is called an erov. Today, there are erovs in most major cities in the western world, allowing Orthodox Jews to ignore the oppressive arbitrary rules that they invented for themselves.

Individuals do much the same thing as the rabbis, playing linguistic tricks, but on a smaller scale. The technique might be less subtle, but it is identical in principle. It is not uncommon to find Jewish people who will not eat pork, but will eat bacon, ham, gammon and wild boar. A simple redefinition of the word pork achieves the desired result.  Instead of denoting all pig-meat, the word pork is regarded as denoting only particular types of pig-meat.

Muslims are also adept at making up rules and then finding ways around them. One rule prohibits telling lies in all circumstances, but this is unrealistic so a doctrine called taqiyya permits Muslims to lie in certain circumstances. Again, the Quran prohibits the drinking of fermented grape juice but says nothing about palm wine or other forms of alcohol. Even so the Quranic injunction is almost universally extended to all forms of alcohol. In practice this is too harsh for many and those who want to can find exceptions. So in some countries there is a market in medical tinctures, permitting Muslims to consume alcohol ostensibly for medicinal reasons. Again the hardship of pilgrimage – an essential element of the hajj –  is routinely avoided and the hajj is converted into a holiday. Instead of spending months travelling on foot through deserts, living in the open and scavenging for food, many Muslims just jump on an airplane and stay in luxury hotels. Again, in Saudi Arabia the month of Ramadan is intended to be a month of fasting and hardship. In practice it is often a month of daytime indolence and all-night parties and feasting.

For Christians the position is much the same. Restrictions are routinely imposed. Often they are exaggerated and made oppressive. Then reasons are found to ignore them. Jews, Christians and Moslems have all made up rules about making images, and then had to change those rules. Again they all made up rules about money lending and then founds ways around them. Historically, at least a dozen different reasons have been found to ignore the comprehensive biblical prohibition on killing. As with the Jews, observance of the Sabbath was converted from a privilege permitting people not to work became an obligation forcing them not to enjoy themselves. Protestants tried imposing Muslim style prohibitions on alcohol, even though there is no prohibition, or even criticism, of it in the Bible. Again, lying is absolutely prohibited, except when the requirement becomes too onerous. Catholics have their own form of taqiyya, allowing them to tell lies in contravention of the Ten Commandments (Its called "equivocation" or mental reservation). No matter how clear a teaching, there are ways around it. Churches have created whole industries dedicated to finding ways around the clear biblical requirement for believers to give away everything they own.

Perhaps the best example of Christian auto-exceptionalism concerns the historic rules around fasting. The idea was that Christians in general, and monks in particular, should eat moderately, avoiding rich foods and over-indulgence. This was formalized into rules restricting the consumption of meat, eggs and dairy products for Christians on certain days, with stricter and more onerous restrictions for monks. In some cases these rules became too onerous, often causing ill-health because of inadequate diets. Various ways around the restrictions were therefore found. For the rich, the Church simply sold the right to eat forbidden foods. We still have a reminder of how lucrative this trade was. Europe is dotted with “butter towers” – ecclesiastical buildings funded by money obtained by selling the right to consume dairy products during Lent. 

The Butter Tower of the Cathedral at Rouen, painted by Thomas Colman Dibdin, 1879

Monks were more parsimonious and exploited exceptions instead of paying for exemptions. These exceptions had been perfectly reasonable in principle and covered those who were ill or travelling. Anyone in a monastic hospital could be served meat and dairy products. Over time more and more monks took to eating in the hospital rather than the refectory. Some monasteries interpreted the rule even more liberally. It was applied only to food served in the refectory – so monks simply found reasons to eat elsewhere, setting up alternative dining rooms where the rules did not apply. Better still, monks found that they could get around the prohibitions, even in the refectory, simply by classifying animals in ways that suited their purpose. Since fish was allowed on fast days, a simple solution was to classify various animals as fish. So it was that monks classified beaver as a fish, arguing that it had a scaly tail. They also classified Barnacle Geese as fish, arguing that these geese grew from the sea creatures we still call goose barnacles.

Truly, the religious mind is an endless source of fascination for normal people.

Christian Marriage

Cardinals and bishops have recently been claiming that same sex marriage is as sinful as slavery. The Pope has supported them, describing same sex marriage as an "attack on justice". The underlying problem is that, according to churchmen, marriage is a distinctly Christian institution with a consistent long tradition. Less canny churchmen are happy to expand on this: it is an institution stretching back to biblical times, unchanged since then, joining one man and woman, for life. The reason that only less canny churchmen are willing to spell this out, is that is that it is an impossible position to sustain. Marriage has not always been a Christian institution. Formalised pair bonding is almost universal in human societies around the world. The wedding that Jesus attended was a Jewish marriage not a Christian one. The Bible nowhere mentions Jesus establishing Christian marriage. It does not mention Christian marriage at all. 

For many centuries the Church did not even try to impose Christian marriage. Marriage was a secular contract, often based on pagan practice. Most of our pleasant little ceremonies associated with marriage - rings, bridesmaids, flowers, carrying the bride over the threshold - are all pre-Christian pagan customs, many of them Roman. The Catholic Church developed an optional ceremony called matrimony, but did not try to impose Christian matrimony in place of ordinary secular marriage until the twenty-fourth session of the Council of Trent in 1563. For the first time Matrimony was formally declared a sacrament. Even then the Council explicitly recognised traditional secular marriages as "valid and true marriages". Traditional secular marriages continued for centuries afterwards, and the Church continued to recognise these secular marriages, so that for example a person who entered a secular marriage could not then marry someone else in Church. Traditional secular marriages slowly declined throughout Europe. They were swept away in England by the Marriage Act of 1753 and in Scotland by the Marriage (Scotland) Act of 1939 - so the distinctly Christian tradition is really not that old - and in both countries was imposed by law, not voluntarily embraced by a devout populace.

The Bible, and Christian Churches up until the nineteenth century, were also happy to countenance Morganatic marriage and even concubinage. King Solomon had had 300 concubines, and had been acclaimed by God for his wisdom. In line with the Bible, Christian men kept concubines for many centuries, and in some countries still do. In the USA slaves and ex-slaves were often taken as concubines, especially where Christian endorsed State laws made "mixed" marriages between blacks and whites illegal, as such marriages remained until 1967. Then there is the question of marriage being only for men and women. Church Law was perfectly happy to marry men to girls, or boys to women, or boys to girls. In theory the children had to be aged at least seven, and the wedding could be voided up to the age of 12 for girls and 14 for boys. In practice we know of many instances where babes-in-arms underwent matrimonial ceremonies in church. 

Then there is the question of one man/boy and one woman/girl. Old Testament writings indicate clearly that God approved of polygamy. Wise old King Solomon had had 700 wives, as well as his concubines. New Testament writings fail to indicate that God ever changed his mind about polygamy (except specifically for bishops who "must be blameless, the husband of one wife", 1 Timothy 3-2). As Martin Luther observed "I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture". Lutheran theologians approved of Philip of Hesse's polygamous marriages to Christina of Saxony and Margarethe von der Saale. The Anglican Church made a decision at the 1988 Lambeth Conference to admit polygamists, subject to certain restrictions.

So when exactly did God change his mind about polygamy, and how do we know? And why did he not mention his change of policy to his Christian followers for centuries after his sojourn on Earth? (Incidentally, God did not mention his change of policy to Jewish followers for a millennium, and he still has not mentioned it to his Moslem followers). Because of this lack of clarity some Christian sects continued to practice polygamy, and a few still do today. Even mainstream Churches go along with polygamy where it is in their interests to do so, for example in parts of Africa where polygamy is popular, and Moslems and Christians compete for converts. Catholic Presidents in Africa are widely known to be in polygamous marriages, but they still get warm welcomes at the Vatican. Jesus Christ himself can be seen as a polygamist - countless thousands of Catholic nuns were traditionally encouraged by their Church to consider themselves to be married to him. The ceremony in which they took their vows and became "brides of Christ" were conscious imitations of wedding ceremonies, even down to the wedding crown, veil and dowry.

This photograph is entitled "A Meeting of the Brides of Christ on their Wedding Day to their Lord at the Nunnery in Godalming, Surrey". It was taken in 1965 at the Ladywell Convent and is one of a series on the lives of nuns that Eve Arnold took during the mid-1960s. 

Then there is the purported purpose of marriage. For traditional secular marriage there could be any purpose, including romantic love. But love has never had any part in Christian marriage. The possible reasons have varied from the traditional Catholic insistence, codified in Cannon law, that the only acceptable motive for marriage was procreation, to the three acceptable motives recognised by Anglicans. These three motives are procreation, companionship and as a "remedy against fornication", because without marriage we should all be copulating like the "brute beasts of the field". 

Traditional marriages undertaken by Christians were arranged marriages. They transferred the ownership of a woman from her father to her husband. That's why the father is still said to "give away" his daughter during Christian wedding ceremonies. As in the bible, women were a form of property, not very different from slaves and other chattels, denied legal privileges of their male owners. In any case, love was not and still is not required in Christian marriage. By contrast, in practice, love is central to modern secular marriage.

Again, there is the question of whether marriage is for life. Clearly Christian marriage was not. At various times the Roman Church dissolved marriages for a wide range of reasons, some of which, like adultery, were explicitly authorised in the Bible. There is a large body of Canon Law setting out the many conditions under which marriages can be dissolved. The Church dissolved something like 20 percent of medieval marriages between royalty and nobility - pretty much on demand if both parties agreed and were prepared to pay. The marriage between Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt was annulled by Pope Pius XI on 19 August 1926. He obligingly legitimized their two sons.

 Charles, 9th Duke of Marlborough, with his wife Consuelo, and two sons

Christian marriage has never been for life, for those with influence. In Britain after the Reformation, Parliament dissolved marriages, reinforcing the fact that for Anglicans marriage was a secular, not a religious matter. Today the divorce courts in Britain, as in many countries, operate under civil law, not ecclesiastical law.

While in Western Churches, because of divorce, marriage can be for less than life. In the Eastern Church, it can be for more than life. A Christian widow or widower was traditionally expected to remain faithful to their dead spouse. The Church discouraged a second marriage ("digamy"), strongly discouraged a third marriage and completely prohibited a fourth.

Then there is the question of consistency. For most Christian denominations, marriage is not a sacrament. For Catholics it is. Anglicans may marry their first cousins, but Catholics may not. At one time Catholics were not permitted to marry anyone within seven degrees of consanguinity, in practice making almost all marriages voidable. All of the main denominations have different ideas of who can marry. Catholic and Orthodox Churches have different rules not only for divorcees and bereaved spouses, but also for priests. Catholic Priests were once able to marry but now they are not allowed to - though married men can, and sometimes do, become priests. According to the Roman Church, couples who are handicapped and unable to have children may not marry - Catholic priests have refused to marry couples on these grounds even in recent times. According to more liberal denominations such couples may marry. Liberal denominations welcome "gay marriage": conservative denominations condemn it as blasphemous. In short, there is no element of Christian marriage that has been consistently applied by Christian Churches, and certainly not since biblical times.

The fact is that marriage is not a distinctly Christian institution. Christian marriage as we now know it has neither a long nor a consistent tradition. It is a relative late comer, and has changed in fundamental ways from place to place, time to time, and sect to sect, with wildly different rules about how it applies and whom it applies to. Perhaps the time has come to stop pretending that the Christian Church has a monopoly on marriage. If churchmen so desperately need a special word to apply to their Christian weddings, why not use holy matrimony, and leave marriage for the Government and the rest of us. 

An Open letter to the Editor, The Archers, BBC Radio 4.

Sean O’Connor

Editor, The Archers.

BBC Radio 4

5 April 2014

Dear Mr O’Connor,

As you have had a few months to settle into your new post, I wonder if it might be the right time to bring the Archers into the twenty-first century in one important respect.

We all know that the BBC in its Charter has a mandate to act as a propaganda arm for mainstream religion, but perhaps the time has come for BBC drama to be excused this duty - after all the Charter refers explicitly to religious services. There are many areas on the BBC radio where exaggerated deference is still shown to Christian belief, and I suspect that most people are ready to hear a more realistic version of village life.

Over the last thirty years or so, Ambridge has seen a succession of vicars. They have all been attractive, dedicated, liberal characters – just as they are across all of Radio 4. If you know any vicars, or if you read national or local newspapers, you will know that this does not reflect reality. 

At one end of the spectrum, real vicars are often barely Christians at all. To friends they will generally admit quite freely that they do not believe in nonsense like the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. Some of them laugh at the simpletons who do believe such things. At the other end of the spectrum are conservatives, with no doubts at all, who espouse traditional Christian views: generally they barely conceal their homophobia, misogyny and racism. There are some very strange people indeed wearing dog collars - openly manipulating their female parishioners, hearing supernatural voices, speaking in tongues, preaching hell-fire, exorcising demons and so on.

In between, in the middle of the spectrum, real vicars are sometimes unpleasant characters. Some commit frauds and other crimes. Some are pedophiles. Some beat their wives – so many in fact that there is a special support organization dedicated to the support of battered clerical wives. Others have adulterous affairs. Real vicars are often involved in legal disputes with their own bishops, their own organists, their own choirs or their own churchwardens. They are also often accused of having influenced the wills of dying parishioners – a charge that has been common continuously over nearly 2000 years. Real vicars might watch porn and swear. A surprising proportion of vicars are atheists – they have lost their faith but carry on a pretence because they could never find another job in the real world (we know this because they will often admit it after they retire). Non-belief is so common that there are confidential support organisations for non-believing priests. Real vicars have skeletons in their cupboards. Some are alcoholics. Some take hard drugs. Some do little else but read out a standard sermon from the pulpit once a week. If your sole source of information about the Anglican Church were the Archers, you would never guess any of this. The picture painted is not merely 30 years out of date but also massively sanitized. Ambridge vicars are always caring, sensitive, responsible, liberal individuals completely free of spite, sexual peccadilloes, human weaknesses and criminal tendencies. 

The same is true of Ambridge villagers. Nearly all of them go to church – unlike the residents of any real village. At major Christian festivals like Christmas and Easter we are always treated to unadulterated Christian propaganda – listening in on Church services scripted to be as moving as possible.  Ambridge must be unique in Britain in having a conventional church that appeals to young people. Not one of the youngsters in Ambridge regards the Church as an absurd anachronism - another strong contrast to reality. The sort of characters who really might attend church, old women like Peggy Archer, are now made out to be wholly sympathetic. They are not like real church-going eighty year-olds, people like the embarrassing grannies many of us are familiar with: vicious, vocally Christian, anti-Semitic, homophobic and racist, still opposed to women priests, streaming with bile, and incandescent with rage at the idea of same-sex marriage. Some years ago, poor old Peggy was vaguely bemused by the idea of women vicars, but she soon came round to the BBC's approved progressive liberal view. She is also unrealistic quiescent about having openly homosexual relatives. She exhibits not a hint of anti-Semitism or racism. 

Unlike the real world, there no noticeable friction between High Church Anglicans and Low Church Anglicans. In Ambridge, Christians all rub along in perfect harmony without ever accusing each other of being obscurantist flesh-eating Papists or heretical Presbyterian iconoclasts, as they do in the real world. There is not a single Catholic believer in Ambridge for Anglicans to accuse of pseudo-magical hocus-pocus, as in real life. No Christian burns effigies of other Christians every year as they do in real villages, such as Lewes. Neither do we ever hear of a single wing-nut Evangelical or Pentecostalist in Borcetshire. No Christian parents indoctrinate children with Fundamentalist nonsense, a common and increasing problem in the real world. In Ambridge as in the rest of the Radio 4 fantasy-world, BBC Christians all fit onto just one quarter of the real-world Christian spectrum. We never hear of the quarter in the super-woolley end represented by in the real world by the likes of Bishop Richard Holloway, nor the half of the spectrum at the other end represented by traditionalists obsessed by sin and sex. There is not a single creationist in Borcetshire.

Again, unlike real villages, Ambridge boasts only one atheist – Jim – an eccentric who, despite his rationalism and education, never voices any rational argument against Christianity, and is easily manipulated by the vicar. Caroline who used to be a non-believer, now never voices any religious opinion. In the real world dozens of characters in a village like Ambridge would have abandoned their faith over the last thirty years. In Ambridge the total tally of apostates is nil. No one ever criticizes the Church, or laughs at Christian doctrine, or ridicules church-goers – not even in private – another unique feature of Ambridge. No-one ever complains about the constitutional advantages or massive tax breaks enjoyed by Churches. No one ever mentions all the exemptions negotiated by the Churches for themselves, excusing themselves from complying with equality legislation. In Ambridge, no one is ever forced to sell their house because of chancel repair liability, having to pay legally-enforced arcane Church fees of hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund repairs to the local church – another scandal restricted to the real world.

Joe Grundy used to hold the traditional belief that the Bible was true in a literal sense: Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, Talking Donkeys ... all of it. When and why did he stop believing all that? And when did he abandon his Methodism? Did the Methodist membership collapse in Ambridge as it did everywhere else, but without anyone noticing? Why do we not see Anglican Church membership collapsing too, as it is in almost every real village across the country?

When Alan, the present vicar, married Usha, a Hindu, there were two interesting consequences, one scripted and one in real life. The scripted one was some strange soul-searching by Schula and others. No-one objected for racist reasons. No-one lost their faith as a result. No-one threatened the vicar with violence. In the real world many Christian listeners were outraged and wrote in to the BBC to complain about the unrealistic blasphemy of an Anglican vicar marrying someone other than another Christian. These real Christians (who apparently had no idea that in real life several vicars had already married members of other religions) provided a striking counterpoint to Ambridge Christians. A bit of thoughtful soul-searching for Ambridge Christians. Nasty-minded foam-flecked bigotry from real-life Christians. If you look at the news on the BBC you will see that in the real world, there are plenty of racist, misogynist, homophobic Christians making anonymous death threats to pretty much anyone not fitting their model of a traditional Christian. In the real world men like John Sentamu, the black Archbishop of York, receive excrement and anonymous abuse through the post. Like women vicars, their crime, according to their fellow Christian correspondents, is to occupy Church offices while not being white men. In Ambidge, neither female vicars nor Usha, the vicar's Hindu wife, receive offensive mail. Usha once experienced a racist incident, but of course it was not religiously motivated. There are no right-wing extremist Christians in Ambridge, just as there are no rabid religious types casting around for excuses to challenge equality legislation. Such unattractive beings intrude only into the real world, not into Radio 4.

So, please Mr O’Connor, may we have a more realistic, up-to-date, unsanitised version of Christianity  in Ambridge in the future. Apart from anything else you have been missing hundreds of interesting story lines that resonate with reality.

Yours faithfully

James McDonald

Non-Overlapping Magisteria

Christians have made numerous of claims that have turned out to be wrong. Everyone knows about a few of them: the age of the earth, where biblical stories came from, how the diversity of life on earth arose, the impossibility of an Australasian continent, the biblical chronology, the nature of disease, and the structure of the solar system are a few examples.

Up until the late Middle Ages, Christians believed that science was entirely consistent with Christianity. According to the orthodox line God had written two books: the Bible and the natural world. Truth cannot contradict truth, so it followed that the two books must necessarily be fully in accord. If they appeared not to be, then that was because of our limited understanding.

By the end of the Enlightenment this position had become untenable for educated Christians. It was clear that the bible did contradict the evidence of the natural world.  By the time Darwin published his Origin of Species the case was already closed, although the shouting continued. It continues today, although the number of biblical literalists in the West is now minute outside the most backward parts of the USA.

The only realistic reaction to the growing realization that nature and the Bible contradicted each other was religious retreat. Very slowly Churchmen started acknowledging, often in a round-about way, that Christianity did not provide some of the answers. The bible had traditionally been a comprehensive encyclopedia of all world knowledge. Now it was something less than that.

One solution to the problem, as religious minds saw it, was the idea of “non-overlapping magisterial”. In this solution the Church accepted that it had overstepped itself in the past and had erred. It had trespassed into areas where it had no dominion. There were two separate areas of teaching: science addressed questions of how things are as they are, and Christianity addressed questions of why things are as they are. According to this idea, science and religion occupy two fundamentally different and distinct domains of inquiry, two inherently different kinds of knowledge, two non-overlapping magisteria.

This idea has found a number of supporters, including some in the scientific community. In principle it appeals to accommodating types who would like to see science and religion get along together. Stephen J Gould for example was an advocate,  though he seems never to have fully thought it through.

The weakness is that the idea only works if the Church makes a full retreat. There are Church leaders who have tried to make such a retreat. Liberal theologians are safely ensconced in a world where Christianity makes no claims about real historical events, or about anything testable. For them the virgin birth and the resurrection are true only in some vague mysterious non-factual sense. God’s revelation is inherently ineffable. Their position is not unassailable, but for present purposes we will leave them in the safety of their mystical island far removed from the worlds of science and reality.

For Christians other than the most ethereal divines, the solution of non-overlapping magisterial does not work. Traditional Christian doctrine cannot help leaking out of its own magisterium and into the scientific magisterium.

First, it is necessary to redefine a whole host of traditional ideas. Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell can no longer be real places in the physical universe, at a known distance from the surface of the earth, which can be visited, heard or seen by living people in the flesh as they used to be. (In the 1960’s space exploration was opposed by Christians on the grounds that astronauts were trespassing in heaven. One Russian Cosmonaut countered that he’d had a look and God wasn't there. On the internet you can easily find Christian websites claiming to have recordings of the screams of souls in hell, but this is now considered eccentric even by other Christians).

Similarly, Christians had to give up the traditional idea that the soul was a physical organ in the body. (It had been thought to be, or to be part of, the pineal gland). Research to find it stopped, as did experiments to establish its mass by weighing human bodies just before and just after death. The bonus here was that if we cannot find the soul, then we have no chance of seeing the various stamps that God puts on it to mark the sacraments it has undergone.

On the other hand all sorts of supernatural phenomena are able to remain on the grounds that they are not physical. So we can keep angels, demons, ghosts, sanctification, transubstantiation, life-after-death, and religious experiences – as long as we define them in such a way that they are inherently untestable. As has been observed before, this involves a degree of intellectual dishonesty. No philosopher, other than tame theologians, would accept that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is even meaningful, let alone true.

This opens up another problem for the non-overlapping magisterial theory. In which of the magisteria does philosophy sit? In medieval times philosophy was a branch of theology, but it bore no fruit, withered away, and is now studied only by historians. Modern philosophy is overwhelmingly secular, and has comprehensively discredited every attempt to reinvent theological philosophy. None of the traditional “proofs” of the existence of God survived the Enlightenment. If the Churches had accepted the loss of all philosophical territory then the two magisteria would not overlap. But the Churches have not retreated. There are still University departments of philosophy run by theologians. The Catholic Church is still formally attached to the long-discredited Medieval philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. And Christians regularly cite medieval "proofs" of God's existence that no reputable philosopher has espoused for centuries. The two magisteria do overlap because Christians have refused to move away from the territory they lost long ago.

There is another problem here. Most Christians are not willing to retreat into the territory of their own magisterium. For example those angels and demons are alright as long as they don’t do anything. But what if they do. What if demons start possessing people, and taking over their behaviour, and need exorcising.  Now you might think that the mainstream Churches had abandoned such ideas long ago. But they have not. All mainstream Churches still employ exorcists to deal with naughty demons who possess believers (oddly, these demons only ever possess believers). The phenomenon of demons possessing people is by its nature one that can be investigated scientifically. Whoops. The two magisterial just overlapped again.

And there are other overlaps. The efficacy of petitionary prayer can be tested. It has been tested and shown to be totally ineffective – but the fact that it can be tested places it in the science magisterium. There are any number of examples like this. Christians who claim to be able to determine the moment of a person’s death (an ability denied to all general practitioners of medicine). Holy relics that work miracles. Christians who can “feel” the sanctity of a sanctified place, and so on.

Yet another problem is that of religious experience. Neuro-scientists have found that by electronically stimulating a certain part of the brain they can generate experiences that the subject regards as “religious”. As you might expect, people of difference religious traditions enjoy different experiences, so that Christians enjoy typically Christian experiences. In which magisterium does this belong? A scientific experiment about religious experience is not easy to place fully in either magisterium.

The whole idea of non-overlapping magisterial is weak as long as Christians continue to make any substantial claims at all.

Now, let’s go back to those liberal theologians who thought they were safe on their remote island of fuzzy thinking and no substantial claims about anything. The central concept in Christianity is the doctrine of Original Sin. No matter that it was invented well after the time of Jesus. No matter that it lacks rational coherence. It is central to Christianity. The doctrine goes like this: Adam and Eve sinned by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. Their sin was so great that (for some reason that has never been articulated) God needed to sacrifice himself in order to expiate such a great sin. Here’s the problem: this central idea depends on a real event, where real people committed a real sin. But our liberal theologians on their island accept that Adam and Eve did not really exist. If they did not exist then they did not sin. And if they did not sin, then there was no sin to expiate, and no need for the crucifixion of resurrection. In other words the whole foundation of Christianity is removed.

The upshot is that those liberal theologians have not found a safe refuge after all. The two magisteria do overlap, and always will as long as Christianity holds to its most central doctrine.

Christian Slavery

Who was responsible for the abolition of slavery in Britain? It was William Wilberforce wasn’t it. He epitomised Christian thought on the matter. Slavery was anathema to all right thinking Christians. That’s what most of us were all taught at school. That’s what many children are still being taught. Well here’s a question. If Christianity was so opposed to the practice of slavery, why did it take well over a fourteen hundred years for Christians to ban it? The Christian Churches were the sole moral authorities in much of the west from the fourth century to the eighteenth century AD. During that time the established Christian Churches had the unquestioned power to prohibit slavery. Yet they did not prohibit it. They did not even try. On the contrary, they supported it, authorised it and even practised it themselves. This is not easy to square with the version of history we are so familiar with. So let’s unpick the truth.

From the earliest times Christians had no doubt that slavery was divinely sanctioned. They used a number of Old and New Testament quotations to prove their case.  Looking at the relevant passages it is clear that the Bible does indeed endorse slavery.  In the Old Testament God approved the practice and laid down rules for buyers and sellers (Exodus 21:1-6, Leviticus 25:44).  Men are at liberty to sell their own daughters (Exodus 21:7).  Slaves can be inherited (Leviticus 25:45-6).  It is acceptable to beat slaves, since they are property (Exodus 21:20).  A master who beats his slave to death is not to be punished as long as the slave stays alive for a day or two, as the loss of the master’s property is punishment enough:

And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.  Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.        (Exodus 21:20-21)

Do not be mislead by the word servant here. The Authorized Version invariably uses the word servant where the natural translation is slave, in order to minimize the full import  Most modern translations use the word slave, a more accurate rendering of the Hebrew 'ebhedh, Greek doulos. Masters buy and sell slaves, not servants.

If a slave is gored by a bull, it is the master, not the slave, who is to be compensated (Exodus 21:32).  Time and time again the Old Testament confirms that slaves are property and their lives are of little consequence.  To prove the strength of Job’s faith, God sends Satan to test him by visiting disasters upon him.  Among these disasters is the killing of Job’s numerous slaves (Job 1).  Neither God, nor Satan, nor the story’s narrator finds it at all odd that people should be killed just to prove a point – they are only Job’s property and their destruction is naturally bracketed with the loss of his livestock and vineyards.

The New Testament also regards slavery as acceptable.  It instructs slaves to accept their position with humility (Ephesians 6:5-8), and to please their masters in everything (Titus 2:9, c/f Colossians 3:22).  They are commanded to serve Christian slave owners better than other masters (1 Timothy 6:1-2).  Even oppressive masters are to be obeyed according to 1 Peter 2:18.  Jesus mentioned slavery more than once in the New Testament, but never with the slightest hint of criticism of it.  Christians interpreted this as not merely acceptance, but approval. If Jesus had opposed slavery he would, they claimed, surely have said so.  Church Fathers instructed the faithful not to let slaves get above themselves, and the Church endorsed St Augustine’s view that slavery was ordained by God as a punishment for sin. Soon the Christian Church would become the largest slave owner in the Roman Empire. 

In pagan times slaves who escaped and sought sanctuary at a holy temple would not be returned to their masters if they had a justifiable complaint.  When the Roman Empire became Christian, escaped slaves could seek refuge in a church, but they would always be returned to their masters, whether they had a justifiable complaint or not.  When Christian slaves in the early Asian Church suggested that community funds might be used to purchase their freedom, they were soon disabused of their hopes, a line supported by Ignatius of Antioch, one of the greatest Church Fathers.  He declared that their ambition should be to become better slaves, and they should not expect the Church to gain their liberty for them.  Bishops themselves owned slaves and accepted the usual conventions.  So did other churchmen.  Slave collars dating from around AD 400 have been found in Sardinia, stamped with the sign of the cross and the name ‘Felix the Archdeacon’ - the name of the owner, not the slave.  Pagan slaves who wanted to become Christians required permission from their masters.  For many centuries, right up to modern times, servile birth was a bar to ordination, and the Church confirmed the acceptability of slavery in many other ways.  For example, the Church Council of Châlons in AD 813 decreed that slaves belonging to different owners could not marry without their owners’ consent. 

The Church found new reasons to take people into slavery.  The Third Synod of Toledo in AD 589 decreed that women found in the houses of a clergyman in suspicious circumstances should be sold into slavery by the clergyman’s bishop.  In attempting to enforce clerical celibacy later popes revived the idea of taking the wives and concubines of churchmen into slavery.  Urban II tried the idea against subdeacons’ wives in 1089.  In 1095 wives of priests were sold into slavery as well.  Urban’s successor, Leo IX, had priest’s wives taken into slavery for service at the Lateran Palace.  Saints, Popes and Church Officials approved the practice of slavery for centuries.  Slavery was a major trade in Christendom.  Until the early tenth century the main Venetian export was slaves from central Europe.  Later the Genoese developed another major Mediterranean slave trade..  In Spain a single inquisitor, Torquemada, condemned 91,371 people to slavery.

The record of the Anglican Church was no better than that of the Roman Church.  It was the universal opinion of churchmen that God had ordained slavery, and clergymen had no qualms about owning slaves themselves.  Anglican slave traders were often extremely devout, and widely respected by their fellow Christians.  It never occurred to them, or to their priests or ministers, that slave trading might be immoral.  The most famous English slave trader, Sir John Hawkins, a particularly pious man, had slave ships named  Angel, Jesus, and Grace of God. 

Since they were merely property, there could be no objection to branding slaves just like any other animal.  Neither was there any obligation to treat them more humanely than animals in other ways.  Prices depended on supply and demand like any other commodity.  Female breeders would be sold at a premium prices, especially after the importation of African slaves to North America and the Caribbean ceased.  Sometimes slaves were hamstrung to stop them escaping.  If they had escaped before, they could have a leg amputated to stop them doing so again.  Once their working lives were over, they were put-down. Where was the right to life then, one wonders. Black slaves in the Caribbean and Americas received very little education, but what they were allowed was mainly religious.  Preachers tended to concentrate on biblical passages that endorsed slavery and counselled passive acceptance of it. A favourite passage was “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh”.(1 Peter 2:18, New International Version). Among missionaries, the problem of preventing slaves from enjoying themselves on the Sabbath appears to have been far more important than the ethical question of slavery itself.

Slave owning Churchmen were not particularly notable as good masters.  Indeed some of the worst masters were clergymen.  In the court of St Ann’s in Jamaica in 1829 the Rev. G. W. Bridges was charged with maltreating a female slave.  For a trivial mistake he had stripped her, tied her by the hands to the ceiling so that her toes hardly touched the ground, then flogged her with a bamboo rod until she was a “mass of lacerated flesh and gore” from her shoulders to her calves.  The facts were established, but as usual in such cases he was acquitted. 

Important questions for the Church were the extent of slave owners’ rights to flog or burn their human property, to split up their families, and to demand sexual gratification from them.  This last must have been a particular problem, since owners could point to several biblical passages which take it for granted that a slave girl is available for her master’s sexual desires.  This was clearly difficult to square with the knowledge that sex was sinful. 

Slavery was not confined to selected races or to members of other religions: Christians routinely condemned their fellow believers to slavery.  John Knox for example spent eighteen months as a galley-slave under French Catholics.  In the late eighteenth century Popes still held slaves, as did Anglican clergymen.  It was still beyond question that slavery was ordained by God, and therefore unimpeachable.  In the second part of The Age of Reason published in the 1790’s Thomas Paine noted that, in the Book of Numbers, Moses had given instructions as to how to treat Midianite captives.  Essentially, everyone was to be executed except virgins, whom the victors were allowed to keep alive for themselves.  God then gave instructions as to how the booty, including 32,000 virgins, should be divided up between the victors.  Paine summarised the relevant passage: “Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters”.  In response to this, Bishop Watson of Llandaff pointed out that the virgins had not been spared for any immoral purpose, as Paine had wickedly suggested.  Rather, he said, they were spared so that they could be taken into slavery.  Obviously, there could be no ethical objection to this, since slavery was divinely sanctioned.  The bishop’s rebuttal was perfectly acceptable to mainstream eighteenth century Christians, who found sex objectionable but slavery not at all objectionable.  According to the Churches, slavery was not merely permitted, it was obligatory.  Slavery was a God-given institution.  To oppose what God had sanctioned was positively sinful. 

In America opposition to slavery was first voiced by freethinkers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.  Initially a Quaker, later a Deist, Paine was widely condemned as an unbeliever.  He wrote an influential article against slavery in 1775, and when he drafted the American Declaration of Independence the following year, he included a clause against slavery that was later struck out.  Under Quaker influence, slavery was made illegal in the state of Pennsylvania in 1780. Other campaigners included the rationalist James Russell Lowell, the sceptical ex-preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the freethinker Wendell Phillips.  While Thomas Paine opposed slavery in America, his fellow freethinkers opposed it in his native country.  Granville Sharp, a humanitarian lawyer, sought to bring cases before the courts, arguing that throwing slaves overboard to drown was murder.  (The prevailing Christian view was that a ship’s captain was free to jettison them, just like any other property, for example to save the ship in a storm).  Within a few years, by 1787, a campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade was started by a group of Quakers.  It was supported by non-believers.  As it grew it was joined by various nonconformists groups and a few evangelical Christians, but it was consistently opposed by all traditional Churches and mainstream Christian sects. 

William Wilberforce is usually accredited with abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, though he came many years after the first abolitionist campaigners.  He too was an unbeliever when he espoused abolition.  Later as an Evangelical he was able to sit in Parliament (which unbelievers were not).  There he stood out among his fellow Christians as an exception.  He noted that those who opposed slavery were non-conformists and godless reformers, and that Church people were indifferent to the cause of abolition, or else actively obstructed it.  His grass-root support came from Quakers, Unitarians, Utilitarians, and assorted Freethinkers and religious sceptics.  Like the freethinkers who had started the movement, Wilberforce was condemned by the mainstream Churches as presuming to know better than the bible.

The Church had enjoyed 1500 years during which it had had the power to ban slavery, but had failed to do so, or even to have expressed any desire to do so.  Now that change was in the air, the mainstream churches opposed reform with all their power.  They vilified reformers and attacked them for daring to question the plain word of God.  Anglican Clergymen still owned slaves and continued to oppose abolition well into the nineteenth century.  One of their number was the most effective supporter of slavery during the 1820’s abolitionist campaign in Jamaica.  All mainstream Churches agreed with the traditional view that slavery was ordained by God.  To practice slavery was therefore meritorious, and to try to stop the practice was sinful.  With the exception of Quakers, all denominations agreed.  In 1843 some 1,200 Methodist ministers owned slaves in the USA. 

Under popular pressure generated by secular thinkers, all of the mainstream Churches except the Baptists performed a volte face during the nineteenth century.  When enough of their members had moved over to the abolitionist cause, the Churches followed.  Priests, bishops and popes felt obliged to cease owning slaves.  Slavery was criticised for the first time by a pope (Gregory XVI) in 1839, but it was not until the Berlin Conference of 1884 that Catholic countries fell into line with Protestant ones on the question of slavery, agreeing that it should be suppressed.  The official U turn came in 1888 when Pope Leo XIII declared in In plurimis that the Church was now opposed to it. 

In the USA the pattern was similar: slavery was advocated by nineteenth century Churchmen, though secular forces opposed it.  It was a commonplace that “Slavery is of God”.  Christian ministers wrote almost half of all defences of slavery published in America.  Such defences were routinely produced by the Churches.  Along with these defences, Christian Churches circulated biblical texts on the subject of “Negro inferiority”, and the need for total unquestioning obedience.  A civil war was fought before the Christian South was forced to abandon slavery in 1863.  Yet the Southern Presbyterian Church could still resolve in 1864 that it was their peculiar mission to conserve the institution of slavery, and to make it a blessing to both master and slave.  To hold that slavery was inherently evil was “one of the most pernicious heresies of modern times”. 

Black slaves were not permitted to learn to read or write, since education was seen as a threat to God’s natural order.  An American slave who adopted the name Frederick Douglas was exceptional in that he learned to read and write in secret.  After he was granted his freedom he wrote:

Were I to be again reduced to chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me…[I] hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-stripping, cradle plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

The Christianity he had in mind was not particularly American.  Nor is it yet dead.  There are still Christians prepared to uphold the traditional Christian line.  In 1996 Charles Davidson, a devout Christian Senator from Alabama, said that slavery had been good for blacks, and pointed out that the practice had biblical approval, citing the traditional proof-texts such as Leviticus 25:44 and 1 Timothy 6:1.  As he well knew, he still held the traditional Christian line, while almost all other Christians had abandoned it and even largely forgotten about it.

The story now propagated by some Churches – that they were responsible for abolition – is simply false.  The first country to abolish slavery was France, under an anti-clerical revolutionary government in the 1790’s.  Abolition came in Britain in the early nineteenth century, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Anglican Church, and it was achieved through the efforts of an alliance of unbelievers, freethinkers, Quakers and fringe Christians who galvanised public opinion.  In the USA it came in the second half of the century, again in the face of intense opposition from the Churches.  The abolitionists won largely because slavery was no longer financially viable. Strongly Catholic Brazil was the last Christian country to abolish slavery in 1888.

The only significant Christian sect that has any reason to be proud about its record is the Quakers. All other mainstream Churches have a record which is so much of an embarrassment that an entirely fictitious version has had to be invented. This is the familiar version that the Churches started teaching in the twentieth century, with orthodox Christians playing the part of the good guys. It proved so much more edifying than the truth that schools are still teaching it.

More, with references, at http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gaa_slavery.htm

Who Counts as a Christian?

Who counts as a Christian? You might think this is a pointless question, and you think so for several reasons. You might think the answer is obvious. You might think it does not matter.

The answer is not obvious and it does matter. Why does it matter? Well for one thing the number of Christians and other religious groups in the population is an important consideration in all sorts of public policy. In Britain, the state subsidises and promotes Christianity because this is a “Christian Country”. It supports an Established Church, allowing bishops to sit in parliament. It exempts churches from a range of taxes and from laws that apply to secular organisations. It massively subsidises religious schools – what we now euphemistically call Faith Schools. Even ordinary schools are required by law to carry out daily acts of “broadly Christian worship”.  We all pay for thousands of chaplains in the armed forces, hospitals, prisons, police forces, and so on. And it is not only the state. The BBC acts as an unpaid propaganda machine for religion in general and Christianity in particular. The BBC’s religious programming departments pumps out a diet of programmes uniformly sympathetic to a particular strand of ecumenical moderate belief. Even national newspapers run columns angled at Christian believers. All this social engineering is done on the grounds that a large portion of the population is Christian.

So it really does matter who counts as a Christian. If the proportion of believers in the population is to determine matters like parliamentary representation, tax exemptions, planning and other legal privileges, financial subsidies, special educational rights and so on, then we need to know how many Christians there are, and if they are in an overwhelming majority as they certainly were in the 1950s.

There are several ways of determining who is a Christian. All of them are questionable, but let’s just look at a few of them. The method Churches themselves traditionally use are statistics based on baptisms. This method gives quite a high proportion (70% but falling). It is high for the very obvious reason that it includes apostates and indeed most of the country’s atheists, agnostics, rationalists. Most were baptized, as infants, without their consent. Even if baptisms drop off dramatically, as they are doing, it will take two or three generations for the statistics to catch up – by which time even more generations of infants will have been counted as members of the fold.

Incensed by this, a number of non-believers have tried to get themselves removed from the numbers cited by individual churches. Their stories make interesting reading – you can find lots of them on the internet. A few years ago most Churches were stating that there is no mechanism to reverse a baptism. A number of atheist websites offered debaptisim certificates as a joke, but realised that there was a serious demand after tens of thousands expressed an interest. In countries that impose an opt-out church tax, like Germany, hundreds of thousands started opting out it. From 1983 to 2009 the Catholic Church allowed people to “defect” through a formal act called an actus formalis defectionis ab Ecclesia catholica, but provision for this was removed from the Code of Cannon Law in 2009.  Since then baptised Roman Catholics have started going out of their way to get themselves excommunicated in order to be formally removed from membership. In France 71 year-old Rene Lebouvier won a legal case in 2012 to get his name removed from the baptismal registry. Anglican Churches now have formal application forms for people to be “unbaptized”. Other churches still have no mechanism at all for officially leaving them.

In any case it is clear that 70% is a massive overestimate based on the faulty assumption that anyone baptised into a Church will remain a believer, and that it is so unreliable that it is worthless. Suppose we counted only those Christians who had been baptized or confirmed as adults. What would that number of Christians be? 1%, 2% perhaps 3% of the population. Now of course this is not an accurate figure, no one would claim that it was. But it is no more misleading than the one the Churches use. It is just biased in the opposite direction.

Another way to assess the number of Christians is the one used on Census forms. Here people self-identify as Christians. In the 2001 Census 72% of the population identified themselves as Christian.  In 2011 this had dropped to 54%. This figure is the one favoured by the Government. You might have thought that it would represent an accurate figure – why would anyone identify themselves as Christians if they are not? Well there are a number of reasons, most significantly among them cultural and social. In 2012 the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) sponsored independent professional market researchers, Ipsos MORI, to find out a little bit more about the people who identified themselves as Christians in the 2012 census. The results were astonishing. Only about a third of 'Census-Christians' cited religious beliefs as the reason they had ticked the Christian box on the 2011 Census form – so arguably the a real number of self identified Christian believers is really a third of 54%, something like 18%. And this is all Christians – Anglicans represent less than half of this. So we have an Established Church to favour less than 10% of the population and heavily distorted laws to favour them along with a further 10%.

The results of the survey are available for anyone to view on line.  They make fascinating reading. 6% of 'Census-Christians' are out-and-out atheists. An astonishing 32% are not really Christians at all but pantheists or Deists. 50% do not regard themselves as religious people. More than half either regard Jesus as just a man rather than “the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind” or do not believe that he existed at all. Few 'Census-Christians' go to church very often, and most go for non-religious reasons such as “tradition” or social reasons. One can only speculate about how many 'Census-Christians' would agree with the central Christian dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity. The question was not included in the survey, but based on the rest of the survey the number could easily be less than 20%.

We could also define a Christian as someone who looks primarily to their religious teachings and beliefs on questions of right or wrong. Well we know the answer to that one too. It is exactly 10% of 'Census-Christians', so 5.4% of the population at large.

Of course there are other ways of finding out how many Christians there are. Another survey could test them on the basic knowledge of the teachings of the sect they say they belong to, or on the central doctrines of their church – the ones that Church leaders affirm are necessary for salvation. Intuition suggests that we might be hard pushed to get above 10% of the population on this basis. Intuition also suggests that Church and State will find reasons not to carry out such surveys, or even to agree on working definitions of the word “Christian”.

So there we are. We have no clear definition of what a Christian is. Those with an incentive to do are left to massively inflate the number of Christians without challenge. And the rest of us pay heavily for it in under-representation in parliament, millions perhaps billions of pounds in extra taxes, and second rate state schools. It’s time perhaps to clean up some definitions, do some proper statistics, re-evaluate government policy, stop discrimination and join the twenty-first century.

Where did Nazis get their Nasty Ideas?

If you believe Catholic Church leaders, you might easily imagine that the Nazis were a confederation of atheists and neo-pagans who forced their views on an unwilling populace. Catholic and Protestants alike fought bravely against their wicked ideas, often suffering martyrdom for their resistance.

The truth of course is very different. The Nazis were  95% Christian from top to bottom (99% if you include Deists) roughly one-third Catholic and two-thirds Protestant. The one influential exception was Himmler, who promoted neo-pagan ideas that were extremely unpopular with his Christian colleagues, and whom Christian apologists love to portray as typical of the Nazi leadership. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Nazis were Christian. The political leadership, the generals, the SS,  the Gestapo, the soldiers and sailors, the guards in the death Camps, the people who organized and carried out mass killings – all were overwhelmingly Christian. And of course 100% of Death Camp chaplains were Christian.

The close connection between Christian and Nazi ideas is highlighted by the fact that Christians Churches and the Nazis persecuted exactly the same groups: Jews, Romanies, homosexuals, religious dissenters, and political enemies. The best known, and largest of these groups, were the Jews. Anti-Semitism was an aspect of traditional Christianity that the Nazis embraced with particular enthusiasm.

Before the war Hitler had boasted to Bishop Berning of Osnabrüch that he would do nothing that the Church had not been doing for fifteen hundred years. And he kept his word. Below is a list of traditional Christians ideas and practices that Hitler's Nazis copied from the Church:

• Public humiliation of Jews
• Yellow patches, the wearing of which was compulsory as a badge of shame
• Forcing Jews to live in Ghettos - the word and the idea were both invented by the Catholic Church
• Caricaturing Jews as rapacious and as dirty, disease-carrying, treacherous vermin
• Civil disabilities, restricting marriage, property rights and public office
• Anti-Semitic legislation (for example restricting guild memberships and occupations available to Jews). Some of the anti-Semitic Nazi legislation was copied directly from Catholic Church legislation.
• The concept of favoured villages and towns being allowed to be Jüdenfrei (Free of Jews)
• Orchestrating pogroms
• Forced exile at the early stages of persecution.
• Burning Jewish Books
• Burning synagogues
• Dispossession of property
• Killing Jews, often en masse
• Charging the families of executed Jews for the execution costs 
• The blood libel: encouraging the accusation that Jews sacrificed Christian children

In fact it is difficult to find any aspect of Nazi anti-Semitism that is not a direct copy of Church anti-Semitism. The Nazis merely industrialized what the Christian Church had been doing. 

A couple of quotations to ram home the point:

"The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognized the Jews for what they were .... I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the Church ..."Adolf Hitler, 26 April 1933

Without centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Hitler's passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed. 

Robert Runcie (1921-2000), Archbishop of Canterbury (1980-1991)

More detail, with references at 
http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gcc_politics.htm and
http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/gbf_jews.htm